I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

. . . [Robert Mugabe’s] regime . . . has lost all its moral bearings, a gang of thieves and murderers bent on holding power at any cost. The book draws to a close with the testimony of Emmanuel Chiroto, a Harare opposition leader whose campaign for mayor has brought down the wrath of Mugabe’s goons. Even as he is celebrating his victory, members of the youth militia set his house on fire and abduct his wife, Abigail, and 4-year-old son. The boy is released, but Abigail’s swollen and battered corpse is found in the morgue. “This is my lovely wife,” Chiroto tells Godwin, holding up a cellphone image of Abigail in her wedding dress. “And they killed her.” Three years after his defeat at the polls, Mugabe still clings to power in his ruined nation. But Godwin’s intrepid reportage has at least given voice to some of his victims.